


No Longer Your Heartbeat

by Anon1097



Category: Hannibal (TV), Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, M/M, Multi, Murder Husbands, Murder Wives, Slow Burn, X2, hunting the most dangerous game, just remembered we get two sets of those if we smush these canons together, lets you and him fight
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-12 15:17:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19134694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anon1097/pseuds/Anon1097
Summary: Villanelle *thought* it would be an easy job.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Fudging the timeline a bit; for the purposes of this fic, events of Hannibal Season 3 happen concurrently with Killing Eve Season 2.

Konstantin is busy dismantling a dossier, scattering manila pages and printouts of crime scene pictures over every inch of table not taken up by a humongous teapot and two even bigger slices of apple pie. His lips move as he turns a page, removes it from the binder and shuffles two of the ones already on display around to make space for it.   
  
Villanelle assumes that he’s talking to her. The look he shoots her when it dawns on him she’s not even pretending to listen tells her that whatever he’s saying is bound to be very important and also very, very boring. She shrugs a non-apology and stabs her slice of pie – topped with enough whipped cream to fill a small-ish kiddy pool – with her pathetic excuse for a fork. Her eyes fall shut as she rolls the piece of flaky crust around on her tongue.  _Mmm._ Yum. Scrumptious.  
  
“ _Villanelle! Pay attention!”_ It’s not quite a shout, but still causes her to start. It takes a lot to get Konstantin to lose his cool. This time she wasn’t even trying for it. He slaps a picture down next to her plate. Her eyebrows rise, just slightly. Konstantin’s mouth does that thing it does whenever he doesn’t want to let his satisfaction show. Villanelle thinks it makes him look like a trout. He shows her another picture, placing it over the first one. “What do you think?”  
  
She cocks her head and taps her bottom lip. What she thinks is:  _interesting._ What she says is:  
  
“Nice tree.”  
  
“Funny.  _Funny_.” He shakes his head and looks at her with narrowed eyes, assessing, searching for, what? A sign she’s cracking? He hasn’t stopped looking for those since they left England. At least he has stopped asking if she’s thinking about Eve Polastri whenever he notices her attention wandering. Likely because by now he has concluded that the answer is always  _yes, she is thinking about Eve, so what,_  and so what’s the point of making her confirm it again and again and again? “You say you are tired of petty revenge kills and cheating husbands, well, all right. This one’s. . . different.”  
  
“Very different,” she agrees, humming and almost cooing as she angles the last picture sideways. “How did he get the tree in there? It doesn’t look easy.”  
  
Konstantin waves a dismissive hand, more interested in making use of the fact that she is, for once, focused on the matter he’d like her to focus on. Villanelle reaches for one of the pictures that have not yet been extracted from the dossier, holds back a disbelieving snort, then flashes a delighted grin followed by a soft  _‘Awww’_  that yields no trace of irony. Konstantin appears disturbed. Konstantin does not have a single romantic bone in his old – and vodka-marinated, and married-to-a-fat-noisy-ogre-woman – body. She joins her hands over the picture, wrist to wrist, fingers bending inwards and touching at the tips.  
  
“It’s a heart!”  
  
“So?”  
  
“So, it’s sweet.” Konstantin rolls his eyes so hard they turn full white. “ _It is!_ ”  
  
“You’re not making one for Eve,” he tells her, voice flat. Her eyes go wide. Is she becoming predictable – no, no, of course not,  _never_  – or have they just known one another for so long he has learned to read her mind? She likes that explanation better, though not much better. It feels unfair that she’s become so much of an open book, whilst her ability to parse what game her handler-now-partner is playing has seen only scraps of improvement.   
  
“No, I wouldn’t.” And as she attempts to reassure him, she realizes that she’s not telling a lie. She wouldn’t. Not when someone else has done the same thing before, anyway. The prospect of Eve somehow learning she plagiarized a murder all but makes her break into hives. No, no,  _no_. Nice idea, but she must think of something else. Something better. “She would stop respecting me if I copied someone else’s gift.”  
  
“ _…right._ ” It’s unclear whether he’s convinced, but it doesn’t matter. She takes another bite of pie while Konstantin collects himself and hands her the final set of pictures. They do not impress her as much. Their subjects are living people. Snore. “The marks. Half a million American dollars apiece, with a twist: our client wants them delivered alive.”   
  
_Huh._  She looks down again, examining the faces more closely. The first man looks like someone’s stern dad. Slick brown hair with a golden gleam, cheekbones  _very_  there, an all-around well cared for and put together look. Dead normal, or dead normal for the spiffy upper class template he modeled himself on.   
  
The second man holds her gaze longer. Not because he’s prettier, although he is. It’s the eyes. The look they have, as though they’ll flee from the glare of the camera the first chance they get. The way they appear to stare through the page and straight into her like a reverse-warped Mona Lisa. Villanelle keeps staring back because it feels like a competition, almost. She can only bring herself to look away when Konstantin clears his throat.   
  
“Why alive?” she asks, turning the picture of the curly haired man upside down so that his unnerving, too knowing eyes are hidden from view.   
Konstantin shrugs. Doesn’t know, doesn’t care, and ordinarily Villanelle would not give a thought to the why behind someone wanting someone done in, either. But this job already stretches outside normal boundaries – who hires an assassin to enact a kidnapping, for one thing? – and she’s curious.   
  
“Do you want this job?” he asks.   
  
She blinks, caught by surprise. It’s rare that she’s offered the opportunity to say no. So rare, in fact, that she can’t bring to mind a single occasion where it has happened. In fairness, she cannot recall a single time she would  _want_  to say no either, but. Faced with the question, she ponders.   
  
One million for the package deal split fifty fifty is a lot of shoes. And it would be fun and, yes, new. Yet there is something about the assignment that doesn’t sit right with her. She feels it in the pit of her stomach and in her knuckles and coiling like a spring contraption along the length of her spine. Furthermore, if she won’t get to kill anyone, what’s even the point?   
  
She gestures at the pictures, buying herself another minute to sort out the knot her brain has wound itself into.  
“Which one is the Cheesecake Ripper?”   
  
Konstantin’s lips curve ever so slightly.   
  
“Chesapeake Ripper,” he corrects. Whatever. He taps the corner of a picture, the one with the man whose normalcy strikes her as carefully cultivated. “This one. Doctor Hannibal Lecter. Formerly a surgeon, then formerly a forensic psychiatrist, much well-liked before it came out he has a taste for,  _hm_. Long pig.”   
  
He offers a wink that Villanelle doesn’t return. She regards her half-eaten slice of pie, face scrunching up with disgust.  
  
“ _Ew_.” It’s all Villanelle has to say on the subject. She does not, however, drop her fork and push the plate away. Rather the opposite. While her right hand shovels another chunk of apple topped with white foam into her mouth, the left rests on the other man’s picture. She doesn’t understand why her fingers seem, at first, reluctant to move. When she brings herself to upturn it, she does it with almost violent annoyance. She pretends she doesn’t see Konstantin’s eyebrows shoot up and get swallowed by his hairline as she drags a nail across Mark #2’s forehead. “What about him? Who is he?”  
  
Konstantin grumbles in his patented,  _you-would-know-this-already-if-you’d-paid-attention-the-first-time-I-explained-it_  tone. It’s extremely irritating. For a moment she’s tempted to irritate him right back by putting the fork through his hand.   
  
She settles on sticking out her tongue and pouting until he finally does provide an answer.  
  
“Will Graham. FBI profiler.” She waits for more. Konstantin obliges, after shaking his head in what might be despair. “Worked with Lecter, got put in prison by Lecter, currently chasing Lecter across Europe.”  
  
“Are they together?”   
  
The silence on the other side of the table is deafening. Villanelle lets it stretch for a minute before leaning back in her chair and heaving a theatrical sigh.   
  
“I mean, if they’re going to be at the same place. Same country. City. Whatever. Would make it easier to pick them out.” Konstantin’s weary expression tells her he’s rolling his eyes inwardly, muttering  _yes I’m sure that’s what you meant, Villanelle_  in the onion domed cathedral of his mind. She crosses her arms defensively. “Not  _everything_  is about Eve, Konstantin.”   
  
“ _Ah-ham._ ” And that’s him letting it go. Maybe. For now. She’ll take what she can get on that front. “So you aren’t afraid Eve will forget about you while you are busy with this job?”  
  
She laughs. She can’t help it. Just, the very thought of Eve  _forgetting_. Hilarious.   
  
Her gaze falls on the pictures once again, the grizzly displays, the morbid artist and his muse. She doesn’t know where that last part came from; she’s just as clueless as to why she’s certain that it’s not inaccurate. The smile she flashes a suddenly on edge Konstantin betrays none of that.  
  
“Eve won’t have _time_ to miss me.”


	2. Chapter 2

Eve _knows_ that she’s supposed to be focusing on the Ghost, but what Eve’s brain knows she ought to do and what Eve ends up doing are, more and more often as of late, concepts worlds apart.

Her daydreams threaten to spiral out of control, to the point where it takes effort to snap out of them. That in itself is nothing out of the ordinary. God knows she used to spend a lot of time fantasizing about living a different life, a more exciting life, back when she was stuck at MI5. Casting herself in the main role of a James Bond-esque spy flick _(“The name is Polastri, Eve Polastri.”)_ and letting her self-indulgent side roll the dice used to be what got her through the long, boring, unglamorous daily grind.

(Bill helped, too. Bill and their shared jokes and lunch boxes and his laugh and that warm feeling brought about by a mutual, unspoken _I’ve got your back, we’re in this together come what may_. )

(The fact that it’s the first time in days she notices the Bill-shaped hole in the world, when it’s been less than a month since they buried him, should worry her.)

The daydreams aren’t new and, broadly speaking, neither is their content. They still gravitate around a more interesting reality in which she’s a more interesting version of herself. And yet they’re day and night. The threat of danger remains, but no longer as that which sets the plot of the movie into motion and provide opportunities for her imaginary self to look cool.

The danger now takes the form of a young woman with blonde hair and a wicked grin, and it’s turned into that which she craves; the reason why it has become tempting to allow herself to sink into the velvety darkness behind her eyes until it swallows her up.

Eve rubs her temple where a migraine blooms, downs her cold coffee as one would a tequila shot (no salt, no lemon) (it’s terrible) (really really gross, after she solves this case she’ll have to work up the nerve to ask Carolyn to replace that damned coffee machine, because as it stands Kenny is the only one in the building who can coach the thing to produce a decent cuppa, and he just looks at her funny whenever she demands to know his secret.) Then she looks back at the case file spread open in front of her and sighs.

The Ghost is no longer a ghost. She has a name, records, a history.  Marya Yeong, 38 years old, a divorced mother of two. The former Mr. Yeong is still alive and well. They checked it whilst looking for some close relation willing to look after her kids. Which isn’t even their purview, insofar as a task force that doesn’t officially exist has one of those, but Jess was pushy about making sure the girls were cared for, Kenny didn’t need much pushing to perform a quick search and Carolyn only blinked twice and shrugged.

One of the pages she’s trying to stop her eyes from glazing over is a transcript of the statement provided by the ex-Mr. Yeong. He’s shocked, _shocked_. She gets the impression that he’s not convinced that they have the right person.

She can’t say she blames him. The woman he describes sounds so normal, so _dull_ , that even someone who doesn’t know her well would have trouble picturing her as a cold-blooded killer. Even her past is vanilla; by all accounts she had a happy childhood with a present and supportive set of parents, whom she still visits and cares for. School reports covering her teenage years portray her as an average, shy but not unsociable student. She met her former husband because they shared a bus for their morning commute. They had a happy, unremarkable marriage until the spark died, broke it off peacefully and agreed to share custody of the children.

Nothing in the Ghost’s history hints at traumatic events, a personality disorder, a reason why.  From the information they have, it’s as though she decided to start killing overnight.

That gaping absence yearning to be filled is the only thing that keeps Eve’s fast waning interest in the case tethered. People don’t just flip like that, like pressing a switch. There must have been a catalyst, something. Anything. 

Hell if anyone can drag it out of the woman, though. So far the Ghost has kept mum, content to sit in the interrogation room, blank faced save for the moments where she looks bored. The way it’s going, getting more than a word or two out of her would count as progress.

Everyone’s had their turn trying to persuade her. She and Carolyn tag teamed and got nothing. Hugo started by doing it by the book, gave up halfway, activated seduction mode. His efforts only earned him an unimpressed glare. Jess weaponized her pregnancy in an attempt to trigger a sense of kinship and was met with the same cold disdain. As it stands, Kenny is the team member with the highest success rate – she told him “Thank you” when he popped in with a cup of not-as-shitty-as-it-would-be-if-someone-else-had-gotten-it coffee.

It’s so frustrating, it makes Eve want to tear her hair out.

She almost does. _Almost._ The fact that the words _nice hair_ fluttering down her thought stream are what stays her hand doesn’t concern her as much as it should. Again, she’s more concerned about her own lack of concern about the thing than about the thing itself. Which is a psychological quagmire she can’t afford to dwell on, not right now.

“ _Eve._ ”

She’s so startled she all but hits the ceiling before pivoting around in her chair, scattering paper in all directions. She takes a deep breath, wills her erratic heartbeat to slow down, runs a hand through her hair before catching herself and letting her arm drop. Again.

“Jesus, Carolyn! Did you teleport yourself in here?” Granted, she was distracted, but still she swears the other woman made no sound coming in. She steals a glance at her feet to make sure they aren’t floating inches from the floor. Nope. And those shoes look loud, too. It’s not worth wondering about too much, though. Just chalk it up as One of Those Carolyn Things.

Carolyn brushes off the remark with her usual expediency.

“I want you to have another crack at the Ghost.”

“Again? You think it’s worth it?” Carolyn targets her with a stare that states that if she didn’t find it worthwhile, she would not be telling her to do it. Eve’s dismay is quick to transform into a familiar bubbly feeling that travels from her stomach to her chest and down her arms, causing her fingers to quaver. Maybe this could be a chance to– “Right. Okay. I’m thinking about asking her about V–”

“You’re asking her if there’s anyone other than whoever employs her who might have it out for her,” Carolyn cuts in, and there is no way on earth that Eve is about to argue when she takes that tone. Eve nods numbly. Carolyn nods herself, which she has learned to interpret as her boss’ equivalent of a victory dance. “The ex-husband called just now. According to him, their children didn’t make it home from school. We need to rule out options as to why that may be the case. If, as I suspect, this is her employers attempting to motivate her to keep quiet, it could be that she’ll be more willing to offer up a name.”

Eve snorts. She can’t help it.

“I don’t think she needs any motivation to keep quiet.” And she needs to sort out whatever it is that makes it so that not a single part of her generates concern for two kidnapped little girls, whereas a not so small part of her is waking up and radiating excitement in doses on par with a nuclear disaster site. “Why me, though? You could-”

“I’m busy, Eve. Exceedingly so. And you have a more . . .” The woman opens and closes her hand, grasping at air as though it might dredge up the words she’s looking for that much faster. “A softer – more soothing,  yes, let’s go with that – feel about you. And lastly? I don’t want to do it.”

“ _Uh-huh_.” The remark shouldn’t trouble her. It’s not like it’s inaccurate. Barbed wire can be classified as soft if you use Carolyn Martens as your metric. Still, the woman’s assessment bothers her the whole way to the interrogation room and persists in her head like a tick she can’t shake even as she sinks down into the designated interrogator’s seat.

The Ghost doesn’t greet. Her face betrays no emotion, not even the exhaustion she must feel. She’s a sphinx. A cypher. Impossible to get a read on.

Eve tries to school her features to mirror the expression and knows she’s failing.

“Do you have enemies other than your employer?” No reaction. Not even a blink. “Anyone with a motive to want to harm you?”

Here a corner of the woman’s mouth pulls, forming a suggestion of a smile that makes Eve suspect that, were circumstances different, she and Carolyn would get along like a house on fire.

“How many people did I kill?” But that’s not the question. Eve guesses that what she actually means goes along the lines of   _How many people do you think I’ve killed, please tell me so that I can feel amused at how many you fools managed to overlook_.  It’s so subtle that she only narrowly perceives it, but the Ghost leans forward as she prepares to speak again. It’s . . . disappointing, kind of, that after all that it takes two sentences to unstitch her lips. “How many family members did each of them have? Partners? Friends? If you want to look for my enemies, I suggest you start there and work your way down. It might take a while, though.”

The Ghost readjusts her position, this time with no pretense of subtlety. Her meaning is just as clear, as is, now, the reason why she chose to become talkative: for the noble purpose of calling her a giant dumbass. It takes all Eve has to maintain something that resembles a pleasant facade.

“You don’t want to know why we would ask you if you have any enemies?”

The Ghost trains her eyes on the ceiling and spends a couple of seconds that way.

“ _No_ ,” she states, at last.

Eve groans. God, she’s infuriating.

“O-okay. So. Mrs. – Ms. Yeoung, can I call you that?” Her opponent remains impassive, which she takes to mean that it’s whatever to her. _Alllllright_.  “Great. Just one more question, then. Do you care about your daughters? As in, if someone were to, uhm,  take them and shoot them or strangle them to death and string them up like cow carcasses, skin and debone them and cut their flesh in tiny little pieces – if something like that happened, Ms. Yeoung, _would you feel?_ ”

There is a short, sharp intake of breath at the other end of the table, stifled halfway. The first reaction displayed by the Ghost that lacks intentionality. Eve makes a point of not smiling.

Internally, she’s high fiving herself.

\---------------

“It was the son. Aaron Peele,” she tells Carolyn the second she leaves the room. There isn’t much of a point in informing her, since there’s no way her boss wasn’t standing behind the one-way mirror listening in on every word said, but she means to underline her victory. “Always knew he was an ass. So, do we get a warrant, do we bring him in or-”

“Dear god, no. The man has an army of lawyers at his beck and call. This matter will have to be handled with . . . _sensitivity._   You understand, I’m sure.”

“Well,” Eve starts, jerking her chin towards the interrogation room where she left the Ghost stewing in her own worry, mask removed now that it’s so badly cracked as to have become useless, “what about her kids? Do you have a plan for figuring out where he’s keeping them?”

Carolyn looks at her. Just looks, making sure her reptilian stare has successfully unnerved her before deigning to speak.

“Her daughters are at home with their father. They always were, obviously.  Who in their right mind would send their children to school one day after their mother was arrested at that very same place? That would be – oh, do close your mouth, Eve. I can see your uvula.” 


End file.
